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The films of Erin Espelie strike sparks at collisions between the scientific and the poetic. Her lustrous images experiment with representations of nature and light, sometimes in seemingly straightforward pictures of animals or trees in the “wild”; other times experimenting with matted frames and superimpositions. Her rich soundtracks create tensions with the images, finding the ironic contrast between traditional nature films with their anthropomorphizing tendencies against her poetical organizations and concern with language; other times crafting a bold layering of “nat

Wheeler Winston Dixon has been making films since the 1960s, in addition to writing numerous books, and has had screenings at The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Anthology Film Archives, Filmhuis Cavia (Amsterdam), Studio 44 (Stockholm), La lumière collective (Montréal), The BWA Katowice Museum (Poland), The Microscope Gallery, The National Film Theatre (UK), The Jewish Museum, The Millennium Film Workshop, The San Francisco Cinématheque, The Maryland Institute College of Art, The New Arts Lab, The Collective for Living Cinema, The Kitchen and elsewhere. In his first Los Angeles show, he screens some of his more recent work in digital video.

Filmforum hosts filmmaker, cultural theorist, and film and digital historian Wheeler Winston Dixon for his first-ever screening in Los Angeles! Based in Nebraska, and most known as a writer, Dixon has been producing eye-opening films and videos since the late 1960s. The program will include a pair of his earlier films, Serial Metphysics, “an examination of the American lifestyle recut entirely from existing television advertisements” (Joshua Siegel) and Stargrove, a dense collage work. We’ll be featuring a wide array of his digital work of the past four years, a remarkable array of digital manipulations of appropriated footage to produce works of social and aesthetic reflection, using technological means to critique the technological and consumerist obsessions of today.

These 8 films approach loss and lineages through experimental visual strategies that document rebirths and Queer utopic visions. Calling out a shared invitation to a then and there, leaving behind and moving towards a Queer sublime, the diverse strategies in these films weave together a step out of harm and endings in this time, to something fuller, vaster, and more beautiful. Curated by Finn Paul.

Ariana Gerstein joins us from New York to present her remarkable animations and experimental films, often using imagery created from scanners. “The tactile films of Ariana Gerstein reconcile her fascination with filmic materiality with the soft ephemeralities of light, time and memory. Using complex hand-wrought editing methods and extensive optical printing Gerstein’s work dazzles in its visual complexity and rhythmic timing.

Created during and between military coups, civil wars, diverse authoritarian regimes, and invasions led by the United States, experimental cinema in Latin America has not escaped the impact diverse forms of social upheavals and violence. In many of these contexts, resistance, even social commentary, can be a precarious, even dangerous, project, and tonight’s program surveys some of these expressions. In the war-torn El Salvador of 1980, the collective “Los Vagos” shot documentaries and one fiction film, Zona intertidal, a poetic treatment of the politically motiv

Filmforum welcomes back the filmmaker (and former board president) Beth Block for one more grand screening before she relocates to the grand state of Hawaii. Starting with her optical printer masterpiece Film Achers, and including her digital masterpiece Successive Approximations to the Goal we’ll also have a chance to see other recent digital work that has not yet graced our screen, and get a sneak preview of a work-in-progress.